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Learning to Look at L.A.

In the 1988 blockbuster “Die Hard,” Bruce Willis plays John McClane, a tough New York cop thrust into the bright, alien, and permissive world of Los Angeles, where, intending to reconcile with his estranged wife over Christmas, he instead finds himself battling a crew of East German terrorists with ridiculous haircuts in a boxy postmodern skyscraper that stands in for America’s anxiety about East Asian capital circa 1988. All of this action is set against the backdrop of a freshly resurgent and gleaming downtown L.A., where the local media is singularly cynical and opportunistic, the police force incompetent and ineffectual. Only McClane—shirtless, shoeless, bloodied—can stop Hans Gruber (a slitheringly evil Alan Rickman) and his Euro crew from murdering the hostages and stealing six hundred and forty million dollars in bearer bonds. My affection for this film is a hundred-per-cent unironic.

The preposterous circumstances of McClane’s adventure in Los Angeles nonetheless expressed L.A.’s anxiety about the way it’s perceived by outsiders. “Die Hard” is a symbolic nightmare in which every flaw of the city is feverishly catalogued, exaggerated, and put on display. The moment when McClane runs barefoot across a floor bestrewn with broken glass amid a hail of gunfire is its most distilled expression: the L.A.P.D. is soft, while McClane, a New Yorker, suffers mightily to get the job done. And, once again, L.A. is a cultural wasteland where contentment is the enemy of good work.

A quarter century later, this paradigm has grown tired, and New York-L.A. relations are approaching a kind of détente. And yet, even as openly bicoastal tendencies become more socially acceptable and rafts of New Yorkers make the well-flown pilgrimage to Southern California, trading Joan Didion’s bleating DC-9 for the violet pseudo-cool of a Virgin America Airbus 320, many of the old prejudices persist.

What this piece is not going to do:

1. Fan the flames of the “New York is over” narrative, as advanced variously by David Byrne, Patti Smith, et al.

2. Propose a tidy New York-L.A. binary. (O.K., maybe just one.)

3. Refer to Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.”

4. Make value judgments about which coastal megalopolis is superior.

What does interest me is why L.A. is still seen as a place unsuitable for serious thought. It’s a notion that many of us cling to in order to justify the cramped and sometimes squalid conditions in which we live in New York. It’s the lingering myth of the drafty garret housing the starving artist, the amplitude of whose genius can be traced alchemically back to the degree of her suffering. Don’t get me wrong: having lived in New York for a decade, I get that impulse. I really do.

I spent six years writing music (which, for most people, requires silence) in a small apartment one floor above a middle-aged couple whose domestic disputes frequently reached decibel levels that would not have been out of place on a tarmac at J.F.K. And there was the time when, working as a bartender, I watched my boss at a dingy midtown bar douse his genitals in vodka in order to “sterilize” himself after a basement assignation with a female patron, only to turn around and fire me an hour later for “overpouring” and thus wasting his liquor. I told myself that these were the wages of true artistry. So I understand the impulse for self-justification. But the record shows that there is a vast and impressive catalogue of great work that’s been created in Southern California, sunshine and all.

When the maverick British architectural historian Reyner Banham was sent to Los Angeles on a magazine assignment in the late nineteen-sixties, his assessment of, and infatuation with, the city caused a great stir among members of the architectural élite back in England. Here was a critic, trained to make rich pronouncements about grand public works built by significant architects, who dared to offer, in his study “Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies,” a reading of the city that took seriously the freeways, beachside bungalows, and hamburger stands (not to mention hamburgers) that so delighted him.

Here is his rapturous disquisition on hamburgers:

Like the film, the hamburger is a non-California invention that has achieved a kind of symbolic apotheosis in Los Angeles; symbolic, that is, of the way fantasy can lord it over function in Southern California. The purely functional hamburger… is a pretty well-balanced meal that he who runs (surfs, drives, studies) can eat with one hand; not only the ground beef but all the sauce, cheese, shredded lettuce, and other garnishes are firmly gripped between two halves of the bun.

But the fantastic hamburger as served on a platter at a sit-down restaurant is something else again. Its component parts have been carefully opened up and separated out into an assemblage of functional and symbolic elements, or alternatively, a fantasia on functional themes. The two halves of the bun lie face up with the ground beef on one and, sometimes, the cheese on the other. Around and alongside on the platter are the lettuce leaves, gherkins, onion rings, fried potatoes, paper cups of relish or coleslaw, pineapple rings, and much more besides, because the invention of new varieties of hamburger is a major Angeleno culinary art. Assembled with proper care it can be a work of visual art as well; indeed, it must be considered as visual art first and foremost, since some components are present in too small a quantity generally to make a significant gustatory as opposed to visual contribution …

One may extrapolate from these lines, as Banham did himself, a theory of architecture that makes room for fantasy, for whimsy, for a kind of playful excess. That New Yorkers might take offense at this willful indulgence is no great surprise when we consider the dominant mode of hamburger consumption in the city. In New York’s Shake Shack burger, the delicious but no-nonsense sandwich is sheathed in a wax-paper wrapper that just barely contains the squat little fellow. We eat it hunched over wrought-iron tables in Madison Square Park, often in weather too hot or too cold. Three thousand miles to the west, Banham’s fantasia continues at Father’s Office in Santa Monica, where the Office Burger, neatly bisected and placed in a wire basket, slathered in onion compote and blue cheese and bedecked with a generous heap of arugula, is, by contrast, at once bark, bite, and bling.

But fantasy can also express itself in Los Angeles as restraint. The architect Rudolph Schindler came to Los Angeles from Vienna by way of Chicago. Single-minded and ambitious, he knew early on that he wished to apprentice with Frank Lloyd Wright, and eventually found himself supervising the construction of a number of Wright’s commissions in L.A. Schindler’s work and, in particular, the house on Kings Road—which he built for himself, his wife, and another young couple—have become significant to me as a way of reading Los Angeles’s true spirit.

Schindler presented an aesthetic of asceticism. His concept of “space” architecture eschewed not just ornamentation—an obvious break that modernists made from their predecessors—but dispensed, too, with the idea that building materials themselves need be beautiful. Instead, his project was to create beauty in the way that materials articulate space. The Kings Road house upended conventions of domestic life by imagining a floor plan without any of the hallmarks of a traditional home. Instead of a bedroom, dining room, living room, and so forth, the Kings Road home comprises two interlocking L-shaped apartments with four studios, one for each member of the household, and a communal kitchen shared by the two couples. But it is the house’s relationship to the out-of-doors that is most striking. Where sliding walls of glass, inset with latticed wood, open onto gardens, and rooftop sleeping porches merge seamlessly with nature, the Schindler House is a uniquely Californian achievement, relying as it does on a mild climate hospitable to the marriage of nature and the built environment. In Schindler, we find an artist whose rigorous engagement with temperate weather and a surfeit of space yielded innovation and ingenuity.

In New York, where we have just endured a grueling and seemingly interminable winter, we intuitively perceive built environments as being fundamentally against nature. To a certain extent, we have no context for Schindler’s genius, given our relationship to private space. And Los Angeles is, still, largely a collection of private spaces.

Here, then, is one of the great paradoxes of Los Angeles: it is a sprawling, heterogeneous city whose scale prevents one from easily getting a feel for it, yet, for most of its existence, its city planners have rejected the construction of public spaces that might mitigate that vastness. Instead, whatever unity Los Angeles achieved was, for many decades, the product of Hollywood simulacra. This, I suppose, is why Mike Davis gets it right when he argues, in his 1990 polemical masterpiece “City of Quartz,” that

Although … residential architecture has episodically served as a rallying point for cultural regionalism (for example, the Craftsman bungalow of the 1910s, the ‘case-study’ home of the 1940s, the Gehry house of the 1970s), celluloid or the electronic screen have remained the dominant media of the region’s self-expression. Compared to other great cities, Los Angeles may be planned or designed in a very fragmentary sense (primarily at the level of its infrastructure) but it is infinitely envisioned.

The city has relied for most of its youthful existence on movies and television to do the job of representing it. Yet Hollywood’s ability to disseminate images and impressions of Los Angeles around the globe more readily than, say, the architectural community of Southern California is in no way tantamount to saying that Hollywood depicts Los Angeles accurately. I propose, in the spirit of bicoastal harmony, that we shift our gaze toward those pockets of culture in L.A. that are too often overlooked in favor of all that’s louder, brighter, faster.

My affection for Los Angeles—which, I should mention, is my birthplace, though I was raised elsewhere—grew out of heartbreak, as the dissolution of a post-adolescent romance coincided with a two-month job in the city. I was neither content nor doing good work, and found myself reading “Play It As It Lays” for the first time, in a dank and poorly lit efficiency apartment in Marina del Rey, nursing myself after what felt at the time to be the single greatest loss I would ever experience. Mornings, coffee in hand, I would wend my way to a pier and watch the lazy descent of jets, camouflaged in the morning fog, toward LAX. Me and the seagulls. And the occasional Venice Beach character, the love child of Lear’s Fool and a troubled Vietnam vet.

Until that time, I had been doubly primed to hate L.A.—I lived in New York and grew up in Northern California, two regions prejudicially disposed against the city. But perhaps because this stretch in my life coincided with the end of “the lyrical age,” as Kundera describes it—that period in the artist’s life when he may only look inward—I was able to look out from the hurt and experience, for the first time, the ache and vulnerability of Los Angeles. The sunbleached billboards and inexorably rotating signs in residential mini-malls. The taco stands. The withered lawns. The too-green lawns. The aging ingenue, ten years out of her last acting job and desperate to be recognized in the supermarket checkout line. The sclerotic traffic. The rusted marquees of once opulent downtown hotels. The ghosts of Bunker Hill. The spindly palm trees surrounding Union Station, reaching aspirationally, I liked to think, toward the heavens, for where else could they go having reached this Western terminus?

The singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane’s new album, “The Ambassador,” an exploration of the underbelly of Los Angeles through the lens of ten street addresses, was just released by Sony Masterworks.